Welcome to the podcast just
saying, my name is Joe McCormick, I'm your host. In today's episode, we are going to address the
real risks of remote working. If you knew the podcast,
real happy that you're here, if you've been here before,
super excited that you're back. We are setting our sights
on a singular goal, which is to help you become an intentional
communicator. What does that mean? It means that you leverage
quiet to prepare and think about things before
you say and write them. And when you say and write
them, they have impact. And that impact can be felt immediately. Now, the reality in our world is people
aren't intentional communicators and communication talk is cheap and people
talk freely and they communicate and it generates a ton of noise. And that
noise doesn't help people gain clarity. It creates confusion,
delays, frustration, fatigue, and the list goes on. This podcast
is to help you get at that. And one of the realities of our
world right now is that people work remote. And you might
be listening saying, well, I don't work remote, so it's not
valuable to me. And I'm like, hold on a second before you
hit pause or stop listening, think of somebody that you know who
does. Maybe it's a family member, maybe it's a college roommate, maybe it's a coworker who
listen to this podcast for them and then share it with them. Share your insights and the things that
you've learned in the next few minutes with me on this perspective of the
real risks you face or they face. Now, maybe you are a remote
worker, maybe you do hybrid work. Maybe you work two days a
week from home or three, but it's your reality that
I'm not always in the office, I'm at home and I'm not there. And what I want to talk about are,
okay, well there's, I can go on, on and on and on about why this is
good for you and why it's good for me personally, I, I've done
remote work for 20 years. I did remote work before there
was even really good dialup connections back to the
server at the office. Um, I started a business outta of my house. So I worked out of the house
and I wasn't with my clients. I had no office to go into because it was, I was working literally outta
my bedroom. Um, you know, the whole entrepreneur story
while they started out his garage, while I started a business out on my, what used to be a garage that was
converted in a family room remote, my fam my parents' summer house. So I've worked remotely and I
have a lot of experience doing it. And it's amazing. And I'm not gonna talk about how amazing
it is because you already know how amazing it is. Not even sit into
traffic, that's a win. Not having, having somebody interrupt you and
bother you and distract you all day, that's a win. Getting to be able to like
walk out, walk around with no shoes on, get up and make a cup of coffee, um,
get tired, take a nap. That's a win. I mean, there's a lot of wins,
there's a lot of rewards, there's a lot of good things about it. That's not what we're talking about
today. We live in a world that's hybrid, that's remote, it's going
to be like this forever. And you can't put, you know, we've
opened up Pandora's box. You can't, you can't get it back in. Okay, so, so I think about this
topic, about this reality. I just remember a story in two in 2020. So I'm talking to this friend of mine
who works at this consulting company. So I'm not gonna name the consulting
company cuz you probably know it, but it's a really big consulting
company. And his team is, is based in all the key geographies.
So think like La San Francisco, New York, Chicago. Well, this guy's in Chicago and his
coworkers in San Francisco. So we're in the full blown
pandemic lockdown, right? And this friend tells me,
he's like, I had, he's like, I had a conversation with a coworker
who was living in San Francisco paying outrageous rent for his
whatever, two bedroom apartment. And the apartment was coming
up on the lease was coming up. And this guy tells my friend, he's
like, Hey, don't tell anybody, but I didn't renew my lease
and I moved to Park City, Utah. And after I got off of work, I just go skiing and this is my new
setup and I don't want anybody to know. I would hazard to guess that that was
a life-changing moment for this guy. And he was at the point where
he's like, I just won the lottery. I can live in Park City, Utah, I don't
have to go to the office anymore. I don't have to pay thousands
of dollars a month than rent. Now I'm not saying Park City was cheap, but apparently it was a lot cheaper
than living in San Francisco. So he made the move and he
didn't want anybody to an know. Fast forward a few years later, there
are people like that all over the place. You know, one of my coworkers a
couple years ago, his, his wife gets, works for Aldi, the German grocer. She's transferred to Germany for two
years. He runs our tech, he comes, he approaches me and says, Hey, my wife just got transferred for
two years on assignment to go to the headquarters in Germany. You know, can
I support the company from Germany? And I'm like pretty open-minded
and I'm like, do it. You know, like let's make it work. And it worked.
It worked for him for two years. He's back now and he had an impact when
he was there and he worked remote and didn't go into the office
one day and it worked great. What we're gonna talk about today is what
are the risks that people face though in their, and you need to understand
them, you need to embrace them. Now, as a background reading for this, I would recommend going to the brief
lab.com and there's a tool section. You go into resources, you go down and scroll onto tools
and you may need to subscribe, but they're free. Go into the tools
section, put your information in. When you scroll down, there's
a section called white papers. And in that section there's
a white paper that I wrote in 2020 during the pandemic, and it's called Staying
Visible When Working Remotely. Um, and it was all wrong guidance to
people why I wrote that white paper at the time. And there's a couple others that I, that I wrote that is worth
reading or rereading. I'm not gonna go over it in depth, but I will talk about the four things
that I covered in the white paper. Number one is the inherent risks
and rewards of working from home. Two is the temptation to deliver too
little information and disappear from site three is the allure of over-communicating
and creating noise for people. And four is shifting from organic
to intentional communication styles. I would read that because
it goes deeper into how you can stay connected when
you are working remotely. Um, when I was writing that, I was
really thinking about like, alright, this is the evolving workplace. This
is a new reality. It sounds amazing, but there's gotta be a flip side,
there's gotta be a downside. And there always is, right? There's
a reward, but there's also a risk. And I go deeper into that and it's about, I want to say a four page
white paper on, on that topic. And um, there's some insights in there,
there's some guidance. And when you, when you look at that,
it could be a really, really nice resource for you to read and
or to share with the person you might be thinking about who works
remotely. Okay, I'll just get to the, the con sort of the, the, some
of the things to reflect on. Um, setting expectations, establishing a baseline, defining the right level of frequency, focusing on what matters most and
being prepared are some of like the key takeaways from that. Um, that white paper. So it's called Staying
Visible When Working Remotely. Go to the brief lab.com under
resources, scroll down to tools, log in, sign up and you can
download a bunch of stuff for free. And I talked about that
in a recent podcast. Okay, what are the real risks of working, uh, remotely of remote work? Here are the four lists in my mind, and
I'm gonna say this in the first person, like I'm a remote worker. The
risks that I face is I'm isolated. Number two is I'm invisible.
Number three is I'm excluded. And number four is I'm insecure. And
I'm gonna talk about each of them. I'm not gonna give you a specific
answer on how to fix them. I think the white paper talks a lot
about how you become an intentional communicator and how that helps
you fix them. But I do want to, to talk about those each
risks differently. The
first one is, I'm isolated. We're wired as human beings to be
connected to people. We want to be social, we want to be seeing people, we
want to be interacting with people, bumping into people,
having a cup of coffee. That whole social dimension of
work is taken away from you. So when you're isolated, and I
mean isolated, isolated, I mean, my coworkers in Germany by
himself, his wife is at work, he's at home and it's just him. Many remote workers have no outlet.
There's nobody to see during the day. I get on a zoom call, it's
just me and my cat, you know, just me and my thoughts.
It's just, you're isolated. So you're gonna probably need to think
about the dimensions of that isolation and its effect on your creativity,
your innovation, your, your, your motivation. Um, it affects
everybody in different ways, but you're now isolated. It's just you're
alone. You and your thoughts. Well, you get a lot of quiet work done, but
it might affect you in unexpected ways. So if you know somebody like this, maybe you wanna talk to 'em and connect
with 'em and give 'em a call because they're, they're feeling like,
you know, I'm, I'm forgotten. Number two is I'm invisible.
What do I mean by that? Um, when people manage other
people, the reason, one of the reasons why you have offices, the way they're set up is I want to see
what people are working on and I wanna see that people are working and I wanna
see that people came to work and I want to see c c so I can touch it and
feel it and know that it's happening. And when a person becomes
invisible, it's like, I don't know what you're doing cuz I
don't see what you're doing cause I don't see you, you're not here,
you're invisible. Well, when people are invisible, there's generally two things that
the manager or the boss or the leader might be thinking, a, everything's
fine. B, you're not doing anything. Okay, well you you want
to make sure that it's, they think everything's fine,
but you, you, you gotta, you gotta appear reappear
plan when you appear. And the white paper talks
quite a quite a bit about that. That's why the headline is called Staying
Visible When working Remotely. It's, the issue is about becoming
Casper the friendly ghost. So if the other extreme is your boss
doesn't think you're doing anything and you're just goofing off and you're
doing nothing, that's not good. You need to stop getting out of like, my boss as a micromanager to my boss is
trying to see me and he or she can't see me because I'm remote. So I
have to find ways to be seen. Number three, I'm excluded. Well,
the deal flow is the deal flow. It's a lot easier for people to include
people when they're around and exclude people cuz Oh, I've totally forgot that you're not
here and I didn't copy you on this, or I didn't invite you to this meeting,
or I didn't have this, you know, chance, contact with you. I am not part of
the crowd. I'm not part of the team. I'm excluded, I'm uninvited, I'm, and I
don't think people do it intentionally. I think it happens accidentally, but it may happen to you where you're
just not included anymore, right? And people feel disconnected, they
don't feel included because you're not, people stop inviting
you. And then last is, I think it's kind of an amalgam of
all the three of those, the isolation, the invisibility, and the exclusion
is people feel insecure. I mean, I'm not gonna cite research here.
You can do your research on your own, but you've talked about like anxiety
and in all these issues that people, many people deal with, how many
of them coming from, oh my gosh, am I, am I in the cool crowd? Am I
in the out crowd? Am I connected? Am I disconnected? Like,
am I gonna get fired? Like, is somebody gonna call
me like, I don't know, like I'm in a dark room
and I can't see. Um, and I feel like I'm starting to
worry about job security and future. And am I good standing
with people and I have no, so these are real risks. I bring them up because we
have to think about them. And I would really highly recommend
that if it's this is your reality, that you stop and have some quiet time
and schedule that we've talked about that to think about the risks
that you face in those four areas. How am I managing the isolation?
How am I dealing with that? How much does it affect me?
Number two is, you know, am I actually visible to the people I
work with even though I'm not there? Do they see me? Do I
appear frequently enough? Is my check-ins are my
check-ins? Are my updates? Are my zoom meetings are my enough
for people to have a sense of what I'm working on and not draw the wrong
conclusions? Am I excluded? You know, are there things happening
that I am oblivious to? And how can I become
more connected to the, the flow of information and the
flow of work? And then finally, man, if I'm worrying and I'm
anxious and I'm insecure, maybe it's a conversation I need to
have with my boss or my clients or my coworkers about, you know, like I need
to, I need to feel more connected. Cuz I'm feeling a little bit out there
like I'm on a desert island and I'm feeling I'm, I'm feeling insecure.
All to say that, you know, we need to recognize,
and this is the wrap up, that these are the risks
before we embrace the rewards. These are the risks. And we need to recognize
that these risks are real and we need to accept that
we need to become a much more intentional communicator
to make it work for you and others around you. Just. Say.